G-type

we don't NEED another box to play 2600 games... what we need is a new box to play Minecraft and Terraria and stream Hulu... or maybe not...

Pengo and Taz were later releases

I like the book a lot.

Pong Sports is a better title. I don't know why Atari didn't want to exercise their own IP/Trademark more prominently. I guess this was prior to the IOC aggressively litigating any and all use of the trademark "Olympics" without a sponsorship or license and I highly doubt Atari would have paid to use it.

Moon Patrol has a music track

It's amazing how much such little thing can totally change the feel of the game. Visually it looks so much more like the arcade, but I noticed that it highlights the other differences in more stark contrast and now the original sounds seem more out of place. I still love the design of the original vcs pacman, even if he can only face left and right... His eye and his 3 frames of mouth animation give him a lot of personality (I also get a kick out of how he does a little moonwalk, when he eats a ghost while traveling left)

I had already had my TI-99/4a for a couple years, by the time I got my VCS, so by that time, it felt like a bit of step backward for me. I still enjoyed playing it but it just couldn't compete with the TI's Donkey Kong, TI-Invaders, Parsec, and Munch Man. Coming back to VCS as an adult, I have grown much more appreciative of it.

Do you remember what project you had just completed when you and Bob Polaro were presented with the choice of tackling Pac-Man or Defender?

You miss out on a lot of points by not getting to eat them again.

Wow! It's the man himself! There's not much I can add to what I said in the opening post other than thanks for the many years of entertainment!

The expert difficulty is quite a jump! Yikes

a few people said that the "Pac-man sucks!" / "Hey it wasn't that bad!" posts are a recurring topic, so I decided to try and find them all. First my topic (which is best one of course!) In Defense of Pac-man and all the rest: (I've ommited the threads that are "what are the worst games of all time and why are they Pac-Man and ET? type threads) Pac-man isn't that bad Attention Pac-Man haters Pac-Man is the worst game! I like Pac-Man! Bong.. Bong... Did Pac-Man get a fair shake? How did you feel the day you got Pac-man 2600 Yet another Pac-Man topic The good and the bad: pac-man

That ad looks rad! Even has the Buckner & Garcia track!

After you destroy all the Alien fleets, on the screen, does the game just end? There's no round 2?

I remember my reaction to it as a kid was "this looks weird" and I honestly didn't give it much of a chance. As a kid, my maze-game of choice was always Munch-man for the TI-99/4a. Now that I'm returning to Atari Pac-Man as an adult, I've been playing it more in depth and realized it plays very well and is a lot of fun. All of its quirky idiosyncrasies only enhance its charm. The flickering of the ghosts makes their colors a little hard to see, but that was more a result of the technical limitations of the the time. They hadn't discovered the programming tricks to minimize that, (although they had some ideas on that topic that hadn't been explored yet). I also agree with Todd Frye; Why does it matter if the exits are on the vertical or horizontal edge? They're exits! It seems everyone's criticism is purely based on the fact that it doesn't copy the arcade design. A couple people here said the colors and and sounds were ugly, but I don't find them objectionable at all. I definitely like them a lot more than the putrid brown and green of the Space Invaders port that everyone seems to love.

For me, Pac-Man beats Mouse Trap because it has so much better AI. The cats in Mouse Trap are dumb and you can easily trap 1 or 2 in the middle and then clear the whole maze with almost no danger. I could play that game indefinitely... it gets boring after you've rolled the score a couple times.

I'm trying to come up with a verb to insert in that post that would make this question make sense within this context, but coming up blank

Pac-Man is a good game! It has gotten a bum rap over the years. I will be the first to admit that Ms. Pac-Man and Jr. Pac-Man are technically superior and more accurate to the arcade. But for some reason, the original Pac-Man is the one I keep feeling myself drawn back to. I think its because it feels the most Atariest of all the Pac-Man games. To me it embodies the 2600. (It was also one of the dozen Atari games I had as a kid, so there's also the nostalgia factor.) I love the sounds: bah-dee-dah-dee... bonk, bonk, bonk, bonk I love how the manual retconned the line shaped dots and rectangular bonus items to be "video wafers" and "Vitamins", and how it paints a picture of you showing up at your arcade like a rockstar blowing everyone away with your skills, thanks to your newfound secret ability to practice at home. I love how Todd Frye did his own thing with remaking colors and layout of the maze. If people want to play the arcade version, there are a million different ports nowadays and none of them really do much to distinguish themselves from one another. But the Atari version is very memorable and interesting because of its uniqueness. Todd was not overly concerned with making it identical since he knew he was going to have make some concessions to accommodate the system constraints. I think he was very successful in capturing the "feel" of the gameplay, and created a game that was iconic in its own way, based on an already iconic game. The game offers a lot of challenge. The ghosts are very sneaky. I understand what their AI is doing, but there is just enough randomness that I still find myself getting trapped by them when I try to get too greedy. A lot of people think the goal of pac-man is to clear the board. Its not... its to eat all 4 ghosts on one power pellet. You get 4 tries per board, and clearing the maze is just a way to reset the board. Eating all 4 ghosts will net you 300 points, versus the paltry 128 you get from eating all the dots... er... wafers. I truly believe that if it weren't being saddled with the expectation of replicating an arcade experience, and people had judged it solely as a game on its own merits, it would never have entered the conversation of "bad games".

They posted another picture on their website that looks a little more credible:

because they said so? Because its normal to have your totally not rendered prototype, on a featureless table with a short depth of field so that the background is all in artfully composed soft focus.

those "photos" look like just more 3d renders. Not a good way to win over an already skeptical group by lying to them.

Game 1 is single player. (although you can only seek)

I like Sneak N Peek too

Adventures of Tron is a lot of fun. Stampede is great too.

I'm all about interactive entertainment content that conveys a lifestyle-transmedia feel and the business verticals that reposition it to make it relevant. Honestly, they had me at "based on PC-technology."